If this is meant to placate MAGA, I think the White House is going to be disappointed. I suspect the new push to go back to the moon is to house Musk and Trump (and the other billionaires kowtowing to Trump) while their destruction of the earth gets close to completion. Too bad they couldn't have gone a decade ago.
Oopsie.President Donald Trump took classified documents related to his private business interests from the White House in 2021, according to materials the Justice Department apparently provided to the House Judiciary Committee.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the committee’s top Democrat, suggested in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that the new documents were handed over by mistake in a slapdash effort to discredit the dormant criminal case against Trump.
[...]
Raskin told Bondi the documents sent to the Judiciary Committee this month appeared to be part of a misguided Justice Department effort to feed Jordan damaging information about Smith.
“Apparently blinded by the frenzied search to find any scrap of evidence that could be twisted and distorted to level an attack against Special Counsel Smith,” Raskin wrote, “you have, quite amazingly, missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss’s conduct and may well violate the gag order your DOJ and Donald Trump demanded from Judge Aileen Cannon.”
HuffPo
Yeah, Pam's not going to do any favors for Jamie Raskin. To be continued when Democrats gain control. Or will it be swept under the rug as they've always done?“These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests, and that Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Donald Trump’s super PAC, witnessed President Trump showing off a classified map to passengers on his private plane,” Raskin said in the letter.
Raskin asked Bondi to tell lawmakers in a classified setting who was on the plane, what the map showed and which of Trump’s various business interests were relevant to the documents. The letter includes an image of an aircraft manifest with a redacted passenger list from a 2022 flight from Florida to New York.
Yes, but would it be out of character for Trump? He's never been working for the interests of the country.If the map related to U.S. military posture in the Middle East and was shown to foreign officials, “that would amount to an unforgivable betrayal of our men and women in uniform who are currently valiantly fighting in President Trump’s disastrous war against Iran,” Raskin said.
People still buying this garbage? Iranian leaders made a deal with Obama, and Trump threw it out.
No, Iran didn't give "us" - OR him - a present. Not in the sense he's implying. Trump is the avatar of destruction - the Trump (tarot) tower, if you will. In the labels I put on posts to help me find something previously posted, I've been labeling him as Destroyer of Worlds. The old shit we have built up needed to be broken down, and by golly, he's doing a fantastic job of it.
When we elected George W Bush the second time, I was kind of shocked, and then I thought, well, we have to see how bad it can get before we wake up and build something better. Obviously, it wasn't bad enough - not enough of us were woke, so to speak (no wonder MAGA hates "woke") - and then Obama came along and smoothed over some of the biggest holes, while still carrying on in essentially the same vein. So we elected ourselves a maggot and gave ourselves a viral disaster, but that still wasn't enough. We elected Joe Biden to try to put ourselves back in the Obama box, and, unsurprisingly, things continued to crumble. Tired of the slow deterioration, I guess, we put Trump back in there to really take a wrecking ball to the world.
What we build next is up to us. I hope we get a new pattern. Stop electing Republicans.
UPDATE 09:07 am: The Destroyer has assistants.
There are going to be incredibly widespread and long disruptions. Buckle up.
Alan Dershowitz is in the Epstein files. And not just for being Epstein's attorney. And not in a benign way.
He's old enough he probably expects he won't ever have to go to trial for it. So, he should be one of the first to be investigated when we finally start holding people to account.Jeffrey Epstein’s attorney Alan Dershowitz made an eyebrow-raising excuse for why he couldn’t have made defamatory social media posts about his client’s victims.
The lawyer, who also represented Donald Trump and O.J. Simpson, told a fact-checker for an unnamed outlet that he did not use a computer, according to newly uncovered documents from the Epstein files dump.
The documents suggest that Dershowitz, a Harvard professor, and Epstein were both the subject of lengthy and in-depth reporting.
[...]
Dershowitz, now 87, was also directly asked if he had had sex with an unnamed Epstein victim immediately after the pedophile financier, which he emphatically denied.
[...]
Dershowitz has faced his own accusations from Epstein accusers. The late Virginia Giuffre Roberts maintained that she was trafficked by Dershowitz between 2000 and 2002. Dershowitz has repeatedly denied her claim.
Daily Beast
I bet he has a smart phone. And an assistant who owns a computer.In 2006, Dershowitz was revealed to have provided prosecutors in Florida with information that was intended to discredit several women and girls who had accused Epstein of sex crimes. He took posts made by some accusers from their MySpace accounts, in which they were seen using drugs and alcohol, and attempted to use those posts to discredit them.
[...]
Dershowitz has previously told CNN that he did not own a computer when confronted with the allegation that he used social media to discredit the victims.
And, while we're on the subject of attorneys covering for Epstein...Dershowitz’s use of MySpace to discredit accusers came two years before then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta, who later became President Trump’s Secretary of Labor in his first term, awarded Epstein what has become known as a “sweetheart deal.”
Epstein pleaded guilty to lesser state-level solicitation of underage prostitution charges to avoid federal sex trafficking charges.
She couldn't bring it to her own attention?Before joining the Trump administration, [AG Pam] Bondi, who represented Trump during his first impeachment proceedings in 2019, served as Florida’s first female attorney general.
The Palm Beach Post asked the question: “Should Bondi have looked into Epstein's crimes between the time of his jail release in 2009 and the filing of the criminal charges in 2019, when many have alleged that he sexually assaulted hundreds more?”
[...]
Authorities in Palm Beach started investigating Epstein in Florida in 2005. A grand jury charged him with one count of solicitation of prostitution in 2006 as accounts of sexual abuse from his island mansion began to come to light.
In 2008, despite an overwhelming amount of evidence, Epstein was given the “deal of the century” that saw him serve 13 months out of an 18-month sentence for only two prostitution-related felonies. He was released in July 2009.
[...]
Bondi would not necessarily have had cause to initiate a new investigation unless someone had specifically brought a case to her attention.
UK Independent
I guess that's a start.The Department of Justice (DOJ) has once again tripped over the basics of litigation in its relentless quest for state voter registration records, blowing a deadline to properly serve Washington’s secretary of state with its lawsuit.
In a filing Monday, Eric Neff, the acting chief of the DOJ’s Voting Section, said miscommunication with local U.S. attorneys led to the complaint being sent to the wrong addresses. Neff said he then mistook a separate court order in the case — demanding to know why Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs had not yet been properly served — as an extension of the service deadline.
Neff begged the court to forgive his mistake. “The United States acknowledges that it should have filed a motion for extension of time from this Court and requested additional time to serve Defendant,” Neff wrote. “Counsel apologizes to the Court for not having sought a timely extension.”
Democracy Docket
Surely they DO know. This isn't the first time they've missed a deadline in a case.“We would expect the U.S. Department of Justice to know how to properly file a lawsuit in federal court,” Hobbs’ office told Democracy Docket. “We would also expect them to follow official procedures of serving the complaint prior to reaching out to media outlets, considering the important nature of voter data.”
They know. They lie.The DOJ appeared to make a similar error in its lawsuit against Massachusetts.* Despite this, Neff averred “under penalty of perjury” in a declaration to the Washington district court accompanying Monday’s filing that “[m]y Section has successfully served all other lawsuits of this nature in all other jurisdictions successfully.”
Was there no vetting? Actually, it's possible that since the experts in every agency have been fired, perhaps they simply look at loyalty oaths for new hires.After Attorney General Pam Bondi took office, career DOJ attorneys fled by the hundreds and upwards of 75% left the Civil Rights Division as it shifted its focus from protecting voting rights to attacking them.
Last year, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said she welcomed the exodus of experienced attorneys, and has repeatedly advertised openings at the office on social media posts and urging inexperienced, but ideologically aligned, lawyers to apply.
Neff was one of those new hires. [...] Before the DOJ, Neff was a Los Angeles County prosecutor who brought flawed charges based on a conspiracy theory pushed by election deniers. That mistake ended up costing L.A. taxpayers $5 million in a settlement.
Does that fit under the rubric of "ignorance of the law is no excuse?" Sorry your boss fired everybody who knew, but, too bad.“The United States instituted multiple related actions across the country and is coordinating these actions out of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Voting Section,” [Neff] wrote. “Litigating in multiple jurisdictions presents unique challenges to navigate each District’s local rules and varying service requirements in each state.”
And we can't forget the filings they've made using AI in which nonexistent cases are cited.Election law experts have questioned the strategy behind filing dozens of nearly identical lawsuits, some in jurisdictions with adverse case law.
[...]
So far, the DOJ’s machine gun litigation strategy hasn’t been working. To date, three courts have ruled against the DOJ on the merits; the agency is now appealing all three. Another court in Georgia dismissed the case without prejudice because the DOJ filed in the wrong jurisdiction — they made the same mistake in California, but the judge there decided to rule against the DOJ on the merits.
Those are hardly the only legal errors. The DOJ’s filings have been riddled with typos, miscited statutes, and included undeleted drafting notes. The agency spent months emailing the wrong address in Oklahoma to demand voter rolls, and they sent demand letters to the wrong state officials in Rhode Island and Wisconsin.
So, they win even if they don't know what they're doing?[W]hile the mistake is unlikely to doom the DOJ’s case, it is embarrassing.
And the delays this filing fault has already caused could frustrate the raison d’etre for the DOJ’s demands for state’s unredacted voter rolls — forcing election officials to purge their voter rolls ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
